As a color still picture encoding method, JPEG, an international standard, has widely been known. As a compression method having a larger number of functions than JPEG, a new encoding method based on wavelet transform, i.e., so-called JPEG 2000 is being standardized.
Further, attempts are made to apply the wavelet transform to moving picture encoding.
As the processing speed of recent CPUs increases, processing of a moving picture compressed using the wavelet transform technique can be realized. In a moving picture, data are successive so decoding processing must be completed within a predetermined time.